Authorship—who goes first?

Giving credit where it is due has long been of interest to me, and no more so than in the order of authors on scientific papers. Rather than “senior author,” I usually use the term “first author,” and expect that the first author of a paper will have done the bulk of the work being reported and will be the primary drafter and reviser of the manuscript that has been submitted for peer review. To that end, JVDI and other SAGE journals require submitters to verify who did what. JVDI uses a Statement of Authorship form (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jvdi) as below:

Readers will note that this information is abstracted and published at the end of each JVDI article. Our expectation is that the form will have been completed accurately and that all contributors will have been acknowledged appropriately. Those who contributed to the work but do not qualify for authorship are listed in the Acknowledgments section of the article. The generally accepted principle is that “To be included as an author, each author must have made a substantial intellectual contribution to the work beyond providing instruction, lab space or equipment, financial support, or dissertation guidance” (http://research.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/UCDavis_Guide_to_Research_Compliance_-20132.pdf).

	Criterion 1 (and/or)		Criterion 2 (and/or)		Criterion 3	Criterion 4
Author (Last name, First initial)	Substantially contributed to conception or design	Contributed to acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data	Drafted the manuscript	Critically revised the manuscript for important intellectual content	Gave final approval	Agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions relating to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved
e.g. Smith, J

Also, with regard to contributions and attribution, careful readers of our JVDI Instructions to Authors (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jvdi) will notice that we are on the alert for plagiarism. “JVDI employs the software program iThenticate to detect plagiarism (http://www.ithenticate.com). The U.S. Office of Research Integrity defines plagiarism as “copying a portion of text from another source without giving credit to its author and without enclosing the borrowed text in quotation marks” (http://ori.dhhs.gov/education/products/plagiarism). The JVDI Instructions to Authors state “Detection of plagiarized material in any manuscript will result in its immediate rejection, regardless of its scientific merit. The author’s institution may be notified.” This brings up the topic of self-plagiarism, also referred to as duplication, repurposing, or double-dipping, which involves the controversial issue of copyright infringement. “Self-Plagiarism is defined as a type of plagiarism in which the writer republishes a work in its entirety or reuses portions of a previously written text while authoring a new work” (http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/92785/file-5414624-pdf/media/ith-selfplagiarism-whitepaper.pdf). This white paper is followed by an interesting blog (http://goo.gl/mlYJBA).

Reviewers and editors are the gatekeepers of the scientific literature. They are on the lookout for plagiarism, and it is fortunately rare, although I have rejected one submission on this basis in the past year. Those with photographic memories need to be especially cautious that the well-turned phrase or sentence that they use without attribution is actually someone else’s work that stuck in their memory.

Grant MaxieEditor-in-Chief